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Anyone who has traveled -ah, the good old times with no mask- knows it: it is customary to arrive in a country and try to find out which works of art should not be missed.<\/p>\n
It’s not just one, of course, but if you go to Paris, you will go to see the Mona Lisa<\/a>. In Madrid<\/strong>, for example, you wouldn’t miss standing for quite a while before the Guernica<\/a>.<\/p>\n And in Argentina? Any selection is arbitrary, of course, and can be questioned, but here we suggest \u2013going from contemporary art to the 19th century- ten works that are worth seeing, between the historical and the most avant-garde, between the social and the experimental.<\/p>\n \u200bBy Julio Le Parc<\/strong><\/p>\n The large blue Sphere <\/em>that artist Julio Le Parc<\/a> donated to the Kirchner Cultural Center<\/a> (CCK) in 2016 undoubtedly is one of the most iconic pieces of art for Argentineans: that\u2019s because of Le Parc<\/strong>‘s importance in our art history; for his role as an original, kinetic and optical artist and for his international track record.<\/p>\n The scale of this work in blue acrylic – measuring 4.50 by 4.50 by 4.50 meters – plus its \u00abmobile\u00bb quality (thousands of plates moving to the rhythm of the breeze), produce a hypnotic effect on whoever looks at it. At the same time, it sparkles: it scatters sparkles and reflections.<\/p>\n When he donated this piece, the artist -who has lived in Paris since 1958- said: \u00abThere they are, here they stayed, from here I took them, they are always with me: those intense years of my childhood. We are where we come from: the center of the world, the beginning of the world… The world beyond (then, in my childhood) was already backed by the Andes, dreaming of the sea\u00bb<\/em>.<\/p>\n These spheres that Le Parc<\/strong> donated to Argentina symbolize his presence\u2019s demarcation here; the act of leaving a bit of himself in his native land.<\/p>\n They also point to one his obsessions over time: to unravel the myth of \u00abunique art\u00bb. There is no \u00absingle\u00bb piece or work of art, since art must have a democratic nature, Le Parc<\/strong> used to say since he was a rebellious Fine Arts student in the early 40\u2019s Buenos Aires, until May 1968, when he was banished from France for joining the protests.<\/p>\n Le Parc <\/strong>was born in Palmira, a small town near the Andes, he is the son of a worker, and managed to touch the sky above with his hands through his works. He represents art, and also the dream, the hope of every Argentinean. His shiny moving pieces spawn smiles, surprise and well-being.<\/p>\n It is no coincidence: surrounde by a harsh reality, the artist always thought of giving this to the public: a momentary gift.<\/p>\n By Marta Minuj\u00edn<\/strong><\/p>\n \u200bSparkling, gigantic, facing the Argentine Sea: the stunning monument to Mar del Plata<\/a>\u2019s famous stone sea lion created by Marta Minuj\u00edn<\/a> in 2013 -which stands on the city\u2019s waterfront, on the esplanade of the Museum of Contemporary Art <\/strong>(MAR)- evokes the stone guardians that have watched over Mar del Plata’s promenade and Casino since 1940, when they were created by the great Jos\u00e9 Fioravanti.<\/p>\n But Minuj\u00edn’s <\/strong>sea lion is interactive: when it was inaugurated \u2013at the same time the MAR opened for visitors-, its purpose was to engage public participation. That is why that first sculptural mammal was ephemeral: it was made up of some 80,000 Havanna alfajor silver wrappers -a well-known brand from Mar del Plata- that the public could pull from the sculpture and take away.<\/p>\n People picked the alfajor wrappers forming the fur of Minuj\u00edn\u2019s colossal sea lion and exchanged them for an alfajor at any Havanna store in the country. Once again, national cuisine and good food are part of an artistic event, this time blending performance, action and an ephemeral monument.<\/p>\n Shortly after, the sea lion laid \u00abnaked\u00bb: wrappers had been blown away; visitors had ripped them off. That is why in 2014 the metal mammal was covered again, but this time with a permanent material: golden aluminum plates, especially designed to prevent corrosion from saltwater.<\/p>\n Whoever has had the Mar del Plata experience of the \u00abMarta-Fioravanti-sea lion\u00bb knows that visiting it is a wonderful plan: there is nothing better than walking at sunset from the beach across Camet Avenue towards the MAR Museum, your skin shiny with suntan lotion, your beach umbrella under your arm, wearing your sarong wrap and flip-flops, and your sandwich leftovers in your backpack. The esplanade where Minuj\u00edn’s <\/strong>Sea Lion stands has seats. And so the very same thing happens every day: families take a rest there, looking curiously up at the reflective side of the golden guardian. The new coastal guardian.<\/p>\n Marta Minuj\u00edn<\/strong>, who never fails to hit the target<\/strong> with national pop icons, knows where to turn: her Alfajor Sea Lion is also a new monumental icon of the beloved seaside resort.<\/p>\n By Pablo Su\u00e1rez<\/strong><\/p>\n \u200bA guy hanging outside a train’s door, dressed only in jeans, his torso naked, his hair in the wind and his mouth ajar, scared by the risk of traveling on the outside of the wagon. Of course, he has not paid for his ticket; he is traveling as a sneak. In the inside travel those who did pay: the artist represents them as gray people, similar one to each other, dull and boring.<\/p>\n Exclusi\u00f3n<\/em>, by Pablo Su\u00e1re<\/a>z, resorts to an ironic code, that of the grotesque art, to account for those left out of a system: his is a work of social criticism but in a key of humor. This way, Su\u00e1rez follows the tradition of other great Argentine artists who dealed with parody and irony: Juan De Dios Mena, Florencio Molina Campos<\/strong>, Antonio Berni <\/a>through some of his own periods…<\/p>\n Created in 1999 with materials such as polyester resin, epoxy, synthetic paint and a background of MDF, it is not quite certain how to classify this Suarez’s sculpture: it could be some sort of a painting including sculpture<\/strong>, a sculpture linked to painting, or a piece which bears something of an installation.<\/p>\n Some authors argue the character’s wild eyes, faced with the possibility and danger of falling into the void (a resource the artist repeats throughout his works) refer to Su\u00e1rez’s biography \u2015his father’s suicide.<\/p>\n Unable to affirm that, we can though observe his piece. The relationship between the title, Exclusi\u00f3n<\/em>, and the standing of the man with the naked torso hanging at the edge of an abyss, give us a key to access the wink Su\u00e1rez ironically conveys to us. Who travel inside the train, who merely hanging…? Why…? But instead of bitterness, the work surprises us by generating a smile. A bit sour, but a smile at last<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u200bBy Oscar Bony<\/strong><\/p>\n It was 1968: in the middle of the exhibition\/event Experiencias 68<\/em>, within the illustrious Instituto Di Tella, right on Buenos Aires’ renowned Florida Street, an artist exhibited as a work of art a whole family \u2015the father of which was a metal worker, the mother, the son\u2015 all posing on a pedestal for eight hours a day. The tittle of such Oscar Bony<\/strong>‘s work is La familia obrera<\/em>, a piece that still continues to be talked about: because Bony \u00abrented\u00bb<\/strong> a working family to put it on display (he paid them, similar to what Spanish artist Santiago Sierra would do much later).<\/p>\n As a background to Bony<\/strong>‘s work, noises and conversations recorded in the family’s usual domestic space could be heard. The caveat? The artist had placed a small sign on a side of the exhibited piece explaining that, in order to create it, he was paying the father of the family double what he would earn during his ordinary working days. Results: public and critics shocked and the eyes of general Juan Carlos Ongan\u00eda<\/a>‘s dictatorial government alerted.<\/p>\n What did Bony <\/strong>want to do by exposing a father, a mother and a son as if they were a piece of art…? He was calling attention towards how the economy and the capitalist system work: with La familia obrera he showed one of the most frequent problems an ordinary family has (how to make ends meet) and revealed how, if a contractor offers more money, the contracted party goes there: the whole of this in the midst of the prevailing crisis of Ongan\u00eda’s <\/strong>dictatorship (1966-1970), which had devalued the national peso by 40 percent and frozen wages but maintained public works (therefore the workers continued to have jobs). He had also imposed a law to restrict strikes.<\/p>\n Bony <\/strong>finally points out the status of the work of art: even a family can become an artpiece<\/strong>. It is no longer a matter of painting, drawing or sculpting, but of stating an idea, beyond the means or materials it takes.<\/p>\n It is interesting to note that the worker-father of this family is not dressed in work clothes or in a heroic position of protest or struggle, but he wears a shirt, dress pants and holds a book in his hand. The mother is also not doing housework or working. In fact, all three members of the family have books with them: they are doing \u00absomething else\u00bb than working.<\/p>\n They read. They study. By those years, this was synonymous with a certain class mobility here.<\/p>\n In short, La familia obrera<\/em> is not just a piece of art but a different kind of production: it is about experience as a work of art. And of an artist who becomes a \u00abpatron\u00bb, a \u00abcompany\u00bb or a \u00abcontractor\u00bb, with a family and a metalworker who do not \u00abproduce\u00bb but work as a work of art (it was considered scandalous in the 1960s: exhibiting people as museum pieces and workers without working; some considered this an attack on their dignity). Certain specialists described this type of artwork produced in Argentina at the time as \u00abacts of explicit labor sadism\u00bb.<\/p>\n Both La familia.<\/em>.. and the exhibition Experiencias 68<\/em> became historic because the police censored a work<\/strong>: Ba\u00f1o <\/em>(Toilet) by Roberto Plate, and faced with this, all the artists in the show decided to stop exhibiting, took to the streets, destroyed their pieces and signed a document against censorship.<\/p>\n \u200bBy Antonio Berni<\/strong><\/p>\n Berni <\/strong>is a fundamental creator for Argentinian art: he made wood engravings to which he would attach collages, sometimes taken out of life-size garbage and junk<\/strong>: tin, metal sheets, wood, fabrics, burlap, lace that the artist or his assistants used to find in the streets or bought (a search in garbage that, unfortunately, is a trademark of great crises in impoverished countries).<\/p>\n But above all, Berni<\/strong> was the author of two emblematic characters in the history of Argentinian art: Juanito Laguna<\/strong>, a boy born and raised in a slum, and Ramona Montiel<\/strong>, a whore, a character influenced by the figure of Emma, the prostitute created by also painter Lino Enea Spilimbergo.<\/p>\n The ideological influence of the Communist Party \u2015which Berni <\/strong>joined in 1931\u2015 eventually gave rise to a \u00abnew\u00bb type of realism. It is this new realism \u2015 the fruit of diverse influences, including that of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros<\/a>\u2015 which can be seen in Pesadilla de los injustos<\/em>.<\/p>\n Pesadilla<\/em>\u2026 is not a collage. It has a mural scale (some 9 by 13 ft) and has endured diverse material treatments to shape its set of ferocious monsters. Most of these were built up with immense sandblasting and layers and layers of paint imposed on the canvas with force, with rage. The colours and brushstrokes of monsters standing on the ground line vary greatly from one another. On the other hand, those hanging upside down from the upper part of the work (the sky?) are mainly red and similar: they could be a group of flying demon-bats. Sanguineous or bloodshot.<\/p>\n It is a painting of a very powerful critical ferocity, but what is Berni criticizing there<\/strong>?<\/p>\n The subject, of course, is open to interpretation, but what is certain is that the artist painted these characters to describe the group of people whose actions prevent a little boy like Juanito Laguna from evolving in peace. These monsters surround him, Berni <\/strong>tells us. They are huge, heavy and dark. Appearing as a block, they represent evil, horror. Cruelty.<\/p>\n Amidst the swarm of such tremendous characters, Justice takes her place: her mouth half-open showing dirty teeth, her protruding eyes and under a form similar to that of an unsophisticated robot (made of painted fragments of nuts, bolts and household appliances). It holds a small, fragile, almost secondary scale. Compared to the monsters, the scale goes practically unnoticed.<\/p>\n However \u2015a desire, a political program? \u2015it is these monsters who undergo nightmares, who cannot sleep peacefully because there are \u00abJuanitos\u00bb who dream and carry out a change in their (individual, collective) paths to have a better life.<\/p>\n \u200bBy Xul Solar<\/strong><\/p>\n No spirit is more mysterious, complex and beautiful than that of artist Oscar Agust\u00edn Alejandro Schulz Solari, better known as Xul Solar<\/a> (Xul: lux, light, spelled backwards). Born in 1887 in the province of Buenos Aires, his parents and siblings already perceived him as a child who was someone special: Xul’s life would ratify this suspicion later on. He was not only an artist who created a completely different and original work, but also a mystic, a visionary, an esoteric and occultist<\/strong>, a lover of literature, music, painting and philosophy.<\/p>\n A friend of Jorge Luis Borges <\/a>\u2014who frequently visited him at his home, where they discussed for hours about religions\u2014, the artist led a particular life: he expressed his inner world and his visions not only through paintings, objects and drawings, but also by creating his own systems of signs and languages. For example, Neo-Creole, mixture of Portuguese with Spanish, German and English, a language with which Xul tried to unify Latin America.<\/p>\n For Xul Solar<\/strong>, his works were mere vehicles allowing him the discovery of spiritual truths. By mixing shorthand, ideograms, signs and symbols, as well as scenes from the visions the artist himself experienced, he would create unique inner worlds.<\/p>\n Xul\u2019s main interests were those dimensions of vital matters that remain hidden, invisible in everyday life. That is why he became involved with the cabala, astrology and tarot (among so many other systems of divination and beliefs), whose signs and figures he links together.<\/p>\n An example of this is his painting Odd Zodiacal Signs<\/em>, created between 1953 and 1954. A very personal reinterpretation of the signs and symbols of the tarot, through this work he assigns each card of that system a name in Neo-Creole; a sign which can belong to the zodiac or represent a planet; a number according to the duodecimal numbering; and a letter.<\/p>\n During those same years Xul <\/strong>painted the 24 tarot cards in the size of a Spanish deck, calling them a Tarot with astrological correspondence. In a second series the artist used the Tarot of Marseille as a reference. While in Odd Zodiacal Signs<\/em>, Aries, for example, is represented as Anubis \u2014the Egyptian guardian of the tombs\u2014; Aquarius, as the Hindu goddess Ganesh; Sagittarius as Zeus; and Libra as the Egyptian goddess Maat.<\/p>\n It is difficult to enter the \u00abXul-world\u00bb: a first step to do so is to accept the existence of other realities which go beyond the sphere of the immediate. Realities in which the spirit invents, instructs, divines and creates. Realities in which spirit lays above all<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u200bBy Benito Quinquela Mart\u00edn<\/strong><\/p>\n The port of Buenos Aires full of ships and sleepless people working, under a \u201chot bed\u201d system (beds were rented by the hour, one worker got up to go to work and another one took his place). It was the heyday of Buenos Aires and Argentina during the interwar period, when the country received immigrants, exports, and raw materials. A country with a strong economy.<\/p>\n Shortly before all this, in 1890, a baby had been abandoned at a Foundling Hospital in the Barracas district. At six, he was adopted by a family from the La Boca<\/strong> neighborhood, the Chinchellas, who owned a charcoal store. The boy first helped his father to carry sacks of coal and then taught himself to draw and paint. Over time, he became La Boca\u2019s iconic artist and its most beloved resident: Benito Quinquela Mart\u00ed<\/a>n, of course.<\/p>\n Criticized by \u00abprofessional\u00bb artists (since Quinquela <\/strong>had not studied at the Academy, did not follow fashions or intellectual or avant-garde artistic styles, and formed part of the usual network of professional connections) and loved by the community and the Republic of La Boca<\/strong> (and in European and North American markets), the painter portrayed better than anyone else the working spirit of a sleepless Buenos Aires that watched how inbound and outbound ships arrived and departed laden with people and products.<\/p>\n In Elevadores a pleno sol<\/em> this can be clearly seen: there is no empty space at the harbor. Everything bustles, runs, rushes: smoke comes out of numerous chimneys, production is non-stop.<\/p>\n Quinquela <\/strong>liked to use a palette knife rather than a paintbrush (hence the overload of oil in his pieces, characterized by energetic, rapid, thick strokes, and the statue outside his museum-house in La Boca, which portrays him holding that tool).<\/p>\n A defining feature of his personality was his commitment to the neighborhood where he grew up: when Quinquela <\/strong>managed to be financially comfortable, he founded and donated to La Boca an elementary school, a lactation room, a kindergarten, a children’s dental institute, a school of Graphic Arts and the Teatro de la Ribera. \u00abCaminito\u00bb was also the artist\u2019s idea, who created it together with a group of neighbors: they decided to inaugurate a \u00abmuseum-street\u00bb where old train tracks used to be.<\/p>\nEsfera azul (Blue Sphere)
<\/h2>\nEl lobo de alfajores (The Alfajor Sea Lion)<\/h2>\n
Exclusi\u00f3n (Exclusion)<\/h2>\n
La familia obrera (The Working Class Family)<\/h2>\n
\u201cPesadilla de los injustos\u201d (La conspiraci\u00f3n del mundo de Juanito Laguna trastorna el sue\u00f1o de los injustos) (The Nightmare of the Unjust or the Conspiracy of Juanito Laguna\u2019s World Disturbs the Dream of the Unjust)<\/h2>\n
Signos zodiacales impares (Odd Zodiac Signs)<\/h2>\n
Elevadores a pleno sol (Freight elevators in the sun)<\/h2>\n
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